So Best Buy sends me an e-mail reminding me I had uncashed coupons. $20 worth. What to do, what to do? Go shopping! (More browsing than buying with $20.00.)

There it was on the shelf. The wife’s been considering it for a long time. Long. Buying Lord of the Rings Online. We got a beta key (thanks to the fellow blogger who gave it to us🙂 ) and checked it out. We didn’t like it. And then all I’d heard about it, I didn’t like it.

But the price was $20.00, to include a free 30 days, and a 10 day buddy account (what we’re playing now), which means, after cashing in those coupons, it was free.

And you know what? It was amusing. Level 6 in a few short hours. The wife and I knocking around a new place, in new duds, seeing new things. And the graphics, they’re okay too. Better than okay. The water is great. The flowers in the fields swaying in the breeze. Somehow the whole experience is just better than what I remembered it being back in Beta. And that Uncanny Valley problem with the characters? Seemingly gone. Replaced, perhaps, by that somewhat more “cartoony” look made popular by another current MMORPG. I can’t say what changed, just that the characters look pretty good now. My Rohan guy looks … suitable. The wife’s Breeland lady, ladylike.

And I liked the nighttime feel of the place. And are those real stars up in the sky? Is that Orion’s Belt and the Pleiades? Felt like Boy Scouts again, and that’s pretty cool in itself.